Excerpt from When Rogues Fall Out: A Romance of Old London While I do not feel called upon to apologise for this romance of love and crime, I am tempted to offer a few words by way of preface, in order to anticipate possible objections on the part of those stern moralists who pro claim such works as Jack Sheppard, Oliver Twist, Paul Clifford, and Eugene Aram, detrimental to the mind of youth. It should not, however, be forgotten that these famous novels were not written as text-books for schools. Nor is this present effort to illustrate a cer tain phase of the life of Old London intended as an exemplary study of social and moral ethics. Sandford and Merton supplies, to the ingenuous youth of the nation, all it can possibly require in that direction. The chief aim of the novelist is the entertainment of his reader. At the same time, it must be confessed that there are no more powerful lessons among those that make for virtue than may be found in the historic records of crime. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.